MAIN: Post 5a: Macro/ Micro analysis of an opening sequence from your genre

I looked at two different opening sequences from our groups chosen genre and I identified all of the different conventions and broke it down into each elements that make the opening sequence. I looked out for Macro which is narrative, representation and genre. I also looked at Micro which is camera (shots/ angles/ movement), sound, mise- en-scene (place), editing (cuts, order, pace, transitions), special effects. By looking at all of these conventions in an opening sequence it helps you find more out about what happens in an opening sequence and how these things are effective for our chosen genre.
-This is the first film that I looked at which is Se7en and these are the conventions I found:
-First image, extreme close up of a book, dark, someone turning the oages of the book.
-Black screen, writing comes on the screen, white, glowing, flashy, small handwritten font
-Image of hands on piece of paper, dark image, font on the screen over the image.
-Fast jumpy clips of hands and metal equiptment, fast cuts.
-Black screen with the name of actor, same font size and font, font moves, jumps, flashes
-Extreme close ups of hands holding a piece of metal, cutting skin off the finger, short jumpy clips, fast.
-Names on black screen with white font, glows, same effects.
-Extreme close ups of images, short fast cuts.
-Black screen, same size font of the title, then fast cut and the title gets bigger on the screen, bold font, covers the screen, shadowed.

MAIN: Post 5: Title Timeline

Individually in our groups we each watch an an opening sequence from a film and the film that i watched was Se7en and while watching this i created a timeline of the exact times that the titles appear. I noted down things such as the time of the first image came in the screen and when the first time any writing appeared on the screen and what font and what effect it had on this part of the opening sequence.
This is the timeline that I made:

MAIN: Post 4: Group Meeting

We held a meeting within our group and we discussed what genre would be the best idea for our opening title sequence. We have all agreed in the fact that comedy would be a hard genre to do because it will be hard to find the balance of the humour and you will have to find out the sense of humour your target audience has and try to appeal to them. We have also said that horror is not a good idea because it will be really hard to make this genre work well. We all agreed that the best genres would be drama or a mystery. This is how our group discussion went: 

Lauren: From looking at the research we conducted, Rom-Coms, Dramas and mysteries come out on top.
Charley: I think we should do a drama with a twist of mystery, as I think comedies will be too difficault for the timing we have, and are also hard to appeal to a large audience as humours vary.
Lauren: I agree, I think it would be a good ide...a to shot a mystery drama with a variety of clever shot sizes.
George: Yeah these are all good ideas, I think we should consider basing the plot around a kidnapping of some sort in order to match our genre.
Charley: Yes, that’s a good idea George. We should try and film something that will not only grip viewers through interest, but also to teach people the importance of staying safe while outside of home.
Lauren: We could have a kidnapping of school children? I think using a hand held camera would look really effective on a mystery drama like this one.
George: Yes, we could shoot pupils leaving at the end of the day, perhaps Charley and Lauren could act as the girls that are going to be abducted.
Charley: These are great ideas! By using the school as a focus point on location, the filming will be quite easy for us. We should use an interesting effect on the camera to generate the right tone and impression of the overall genre of our opening sequence.
Lauren: Another idea we could discuss is if we are using a hand held camera, we could have the kidnapper as the narrator in the way that what the viewers see is through his eyes, in order for the audience to feel included.
Charley: We could do a 'double take' from the crowds of school children, back to Lauren and me, as when the kidnapper realises we are the ones he is after.
Lauren: Yes, the variety of shot sizes and fast pace editing between shots will generate the excitement.
George: We should also use a creative typographt on our titles to link the genre of the opening sequence. We also need to consider the music we are going to use, it must have a sense of mystery and drama to it. 

MAIN: Post 3a: Further look at opening sequences

The first opening sequence I watched was called Contact and I do not like the fact that they have mixed loads of different sounds and songs together and keep mixing because it does not draw my attention to it because i cannot hear it properly and is not clear so it does not straight away draw my attention to the clip straight away. It is also a really slow moving clip and does not have much goin gon in it. I did not like this particular opening scene because it did not have anything that interesteted me and did not draw my attention to it. It also was really quiet and struggled to hear what was being said, and it did not have any of the other conventions of what is usually in an opening sequence. 
The next clip that I watched was The Shining. As soon as the clip begins it immidiatly draws my attention to the film because of the music, it is slow and deep which makes it suspicious and attracts my attention. The camera movement changes aswell and makes it look more interesting. The same piece of music plays throughout the clip. It has names of the producers and actors of the film scrolling up the screen. The music keeps you interested thoughout the clip.
The difference between the first and the second clip is that the first one did not have anthing that catches the audience's attention and keep them intrieged about what is going to happen and make you want to watch the rest of the film. Also the second one has more of the conventions that are usually found in an opening sequences such as, music, names etc.

MAIN: Post 3: Research into Opening Sequence Designs

I watched the Kyle Cooper interviews part 1 and 2 and i have found out different things that they think about and what they think an opening title sequence needs to interest the audience. I noted down the main points that Kyle Cooper pointed out about opening title sequences:
- He said that the opening title in a cinema or theatre should draw the audience's attention to the film and make the audience want to watch the rest of the film and be intreiged in it.
-He also said that the font is important in the title sequence because it gives you an idea about the genre and storyline of the film. He said that in the sequence of se7en he used handwritten font because the main character is a murderer so it is carrying on the effect of the character for things such as threat notes.
-There are images that are used so it gives the idea of what the main character in the film is like, e.g jumpy images means that it is a mystery/ horror film.
-Shows specific images that are related to the film such as in the film se7en it shows images and clips of cells and skin which draws the attention of the audience.
-A good and very successful opening title sequence because it uses good photography which interests the audience, also it has good music and give a mysterious feel to it, all of these different things draw the attention of the audience and makes the film a sucess.

MAIN: Post 2: Choosing your genre

Task 1:

Most Popular genre in film

http://financialedge.investopedia.com/financial-edge/0410/Movie-Genres-With-The-Best-ROI.aspx

There are four main popular types of genre:

Action adventure is one of the most successful genres of film. It has record breaking ticket sales but the films also have big budgets which mean that because of the quality of film it brings in a lot of money.

Drama, Romance and Comedies- Romance films do not particularly have big budgets but they can bring in loads of money. But not all drama, romantic and comedy films are successful and there were loads that were box office failures.

Documentaries do not have a big budget and most of the film is put together by the film makers filming that they have done throughout their life.

Horrors and Thrillers can be very successful and bring in loads of money and example of this is Paranormal Activity which was only made for $15,000 and when it went into box office it made $161,830,890.

Task 2:
By looking at the different types of genre i have found that by doing an action adventure film would be alot of hard work  because it has a high budget and there are loads of special effects that are used to make this genre of film.

Also by doing a comedy film would be hard because you would have to get the right level of humour and try and appeal to the audiences sense of humour and this will be hard because not everyone has the same sense of humer and it would be hard to find that balance.

I think that drama would be a good genre for our opening sequence because there is a variety of different topics and things that could happen whereas, a romantic film it would be a typical 'boy meets girl' storyline.

I do think that a documentry would be a particularly good idea for the film sequence because you need to have a topic that is serious and in documentries they use their own footage of the paricular topic. I think this would not work well as we would not be able to get footage that is believable enough to show a serious topic.

Horrors and thrillers would be an interesting but hard genre to do because i think that there would have to be a lot of effort put into mise-en-scene in terms of costumes, make-up and also like lighting and setting because it would be hard to find somewhere that would look good and be believeable.

We got into our groups and we put together a questionnaire that we could ask different age ranges such as teenagers up to middle age and we did this to find out different views on what genre of film people liked best. We asked for them to choose their favourite genre of film and comedy came out with the highest total but they also said that they liked a mystery/ drama. We aslo asked them how many times they went to the cinema and gave them different options of, once a week, once a month, and another option for them to specify their answer. We asked who they mostly went to the cinema with and by asking this would tell us the age range of people going to watch these genres of film. The last question we asked was what genre of film would you like to see more of, and the most popular answer was mystery and dramas.

MAIN TASK: Post 1: Conventions of and opening sequence

By looking at a number of different opening sequences on http://www.artoftitle.com/ i have noticed the main conventions of and opening sequence and they are:

• They show the name of the film industry that are involved with the production of the particular film.
• They show the names of the main actors and actresses in the film.
• They have the theme music playing throughout the sequence.
• They show the names of the main people in the technical team such as the director and the producer, they do not show all the names because there are too many so they show all of the names right at the end of the film in the credits.
• They use some moving images from the film.
• They use animations that would fit the genre of the film e.g Casino Royale
• They use relevant colours such as in a horror film they would use mainly darker colours.

Se7en

• They use mainly black and white in the clips that they show which tells us that it is proberly a horror film.
• They have different noises behind the music, high pitched, scream
• Writing of names, title etc. move quickly, intense, jumpy
• Images shown over another clip
• Some flashing when names go off the screen

This particular film sequence was a horror film, it showed images of things in the film and was a very dark sequence which is more intense and also the clips that were shown in it were jumpy and quick which is giving a more intense feel to it.

The incredibles

• Bright colours
• Livley music
• Fast animated images
• Bold writing

This is a liveley and more colourful opening sequence compared to se7en, this is showing that how different the sequence and the different ways of doing things is with different genres of film.

Post 11: Targets

• To look more into the location that we were using to make sure it was suitable for filming in.
• To be more creative with the storyline.
• Try different shot sizes
• More detail in the script

Post 9: Production

In the post production process, first we had to capture our footage on the editing computers and we had to go through all of our footage and log the start and finish time of each shot that we had done and we put this into a logging rashes table which was done on a word document.

After we had done that we looked at the logging rashes table to help us find out what shots we could use in the final sequence and what was no use. We had to look at the angles of the camera and if the lighting in the angle was good. We also had to make sure that there was not too much empty space in each shot and that it was focussed on the people in the shot. Also we had to make sure that the actors were being serious otherwise it would not portray the film in the right way. We then went on to start the first part of editing and by cutting each shot that we wanted to use and we put it onto a timeline and did this with each shot that we wanted to use and moved them together. We had to keep cutting or adding parts to each clip in order for the clip to run smoothly and for it not to jump.

We then went onto the sound editing and made sure that each shot had the same sound level so it would not keep changing throughout the sequence. We had to add fading markers at the start and at the end of each clip. By adding these markers it makes sure that going from one clip to another that there is not a change in sound and that they run smoothly. We also have non-diagetic music coming in the last shot of the girl in the waiting room right through into the credits. We have the music gradually come in to the shot and then it gets a bit louder as the shot goes on into the credits.

We then got our ending shot of a woman in a waiting room and slowed it right down so it hardly moved and we placed it right at the beginning of the clip and we made it darker, we then placed our title ‘Anticipation’ over the image, we used the colour red for our title because it is eye-catching and it will stand out and we then faded it into the first shot of the filming. The credits is on a plain black screen with white bold writing and we decided to show the names at different times, we did a clip of one name, and then we placed the next name in a different position on the screen and faded it each time.